Sanctuary

29

The jury was out eight minutes. When Horace left the courthouse it was getting toward dusk. The tethered wagons were taking out, some of them to face twelve and sixteen miles of country road. Narcissa was waiting for him in the car. He emerged among the overalls, slowly; he got into the car stiffly, like an old man, with a drawn face. “Do you want to go home?” Narcissa said.

“Yes,” Horace said.

“I mean, to the house, or out home?”

“Yes,” Horace said.

She was driving the car. The engine was running. She looked at him, in a new dark dress with a severe white collar, a dark hat.

“Which one?”

“Home,” he said. “I dont care. Just home.”

They passed the jail. Standing along the fence were the loafers, the countrymen, the blackguard boys and youths who had followed Goodwin and the deputy from the courthouse. Beside the gate the woman stood, in the gray hat with the veil, carrying the child in her arms. “Standing where he can see it through the window,” Horace said. “I smell ham, too. Maybe he’ll be eating ham before we get home.” Then he began to cry, sitting in the car beside his sister. She drove steadily, not fast. Soon they had left the town and the stout rows of young cotton swung at either hand in parallel and diminishing retrograde. There was still a little snow of locust blooms on the mounting drive. “It does last,” Horace said. “Spring does. You’d almost think there was some purpose to it.”

He stayed to supper. He ate a lot. “I’ll go and see about your room,” his sister said, quite gently.

“All right,” Horace said. “It’s nice of you.” She went out. Miss Jenny’s wheel chair sat on a platform slotted for the wheels. “It’s nice of her,” Horace said. “I think I’ll go outside and smoke my pipe.”

“Since when have you quit smoking it in here?” Miss Jenny said.

“Yes,” Horace said. “It was nice of her.” He walked across the porch. “I intended to stop here,” Horace said. He watched himself cross the porch and then tread the diffident snow of the last locusts; he turned out of the iron gates, onto the gravel. After about a mile a car slowed and offered him a ride. “I’m just walking before supper,” he said; “I’ll turn back soon.” After another mile he could see the lights of town. It was a faint glare, low and close. It got stronger as he approached. Before he reached town he began to hear the sound, the voices. Then he saw the people, a shifting mass filling the street, and the bleak, shallow yard above which the square and slotted bulk of the jail loomed. In the yard, beneath the barred window, a man in his shirt sleeves faced the crowd, hoarse, gesticulant. The barred window was empty.

Horace went on toward the square. The sheriff was among the drummers before the hotel, standing along the curb. He was a fat man, with a broad, dull face which belied the expression of concern about his eyes. “They wont do anything,” he said. “There is too much talk. Noise. And too early. When a mob means business, it dont take that much time and talk. And it dont go about its business where every man can see it.”

The crowd stayed in the street until late. It was quite orderly, though. It was as though most of them had come to see, to look at the jail and the barred window, or to listen to the man in shirt sleeves. After a while he talked himself out. Then they began to move away, back to the square and some of them homeward, until there was left only a small group beneath the arc light at the entrance to the square, among whom were two temporary deputies, and the night marshal in a broad pale hat, a flash light, a time clock and a pistol. “Git on home now,” he said. “Show’s over. You boys done had your fun. Git on home to bed, now.”

The drummers sat a little while longer along the curb before the hotel, Horace among them; the south-bound train ran at one oclock. “They’re going to let him get away with it, are they?” a drummer said. “With that corn cob? What kind of folks have you got here? What does it take to make you folks mad?”

“He wouldn’t a never got to trial, in my town,” a second said.

“To jail, even,” a third said. “Who was she?”

“College girl. Good looker. Didn’t you see her?”

“I saw her. She was some baby. Jeez. I wouldn’t have used no cob.”

Then the square was quiet. The clock struck eleven; the drummers went in and the negro porter came and turned the chairs back into the wall. “You waiting for the train?” he said to Horace.

“Yes. Have you got a report on it yet?”

“It’s on time. But that’s two hours yet. You could lay down in the Sample Room, if you want.”

“Can I?” Horace said.

“I’ll show you,” the negro said. The Sample Room was where the drummers showed their wares. It contained a sofa. Horace turned off the light and lay down on the sofa. He could see the trees about the courthouse, and one wing of the building rising above the quiet and empty square. But people were not asleep. He could feel the wakefulness, the people awake about the town. “I could not have gone to sleep, anyway,” he said to himself.

He heard the clock strike twelve. Then—it might have been thirty minutes or maybe longer than that—he heard someone pass under the window, running. The runner’s feet sounded louder than a horse, echoing across the empty square, the peaceful hours given to sleeping. It was not a sound Horace heard now; it was something in the air which the sound of the running feet died into.

When he went down the corridor toward the stairs he did not know he was running until he heard beyond a door a voice say, “Fire! It’s a.……” Then he had passed it. “I scared him,” Horace said. “He’s just from Saint Louis, maybe, and he’s not used to this.” He ran out of the hotel, onto the street. Ahead of him the proprietor had just run, ludicrous; a broad man with his trousers clutched before him and his braces dangling beneath his nightshirt, a tousled fringe of hair standing wildly about his bald head; three other men passed the hotel running. They appeared to come from nowhere, to emerge in midstride out of nothingness, fully dressed in the middle of the street, running.

“It is a fire,” Horace said. He could see the glare; against it the jail loomed in stark and savage silhouette.

“It’s in that vacant lot,” the proprietor said, clutching his trousers. “I cant go because there aint anybody on the desk.……”

Horace ran. Ahead of him he saw other figures running, turning into the alley beside the jail; then he heard the sound, of the fire; the furious sound of gasoline. He turned into the alley. He could see the blaze, in the center of a vacant lot where on market days wagons were tethered. Against the flames black figures showed, antic; he could hear panting shouts; through a fleeting gap he saw a man turn and run, a mass of flames, still carrying a five-gallon coal oil can which exploded with a rocket-like glare while he carried it, running.

He ran into the throng, into the circle which had formed about a blazing mass in the middle of the lot. From one side of the circle came the screams of the man about whom the coal oil can had exploded, but from the central mass of fire there came no sound at all. It was now indistinguishable, the flames whirling in long and thunderous plumes from a white-hot mass out of which there defined themselves faintly the ends of a few posts and planks. Horace ran among them; they were holding him, but he did not know it; they were talking, but he could not hear the voices.

“It’s his lawyer.”

“Here’s the man that defended him. That tried to get him clear.”

“Put him in, too. There’s enough left to burn a lawyer.”

“Do to the lawyer what we did to him. What he did to her. Only we never used a cob. We made him wish we had used a cob.”

Horace couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear the man who had got burned screaming. He couldn’t hear the fire, though it still swirled upward unabated, as though it were living upon itself, and soundless: a voice of fury like in a dream, roaring silently out of a peaceful void.